Collecting Sketch Maps to Understand Property Land Use and Land Cover in Large Surveys

Abstract

This article describes a method to collect data on the spatial organization of land use within a rural property as part of a large-scale project examining the linkages between household demographic change and land use and land cover change in the Brazilian Amazon. Previous studies used several different spatial approaches, including maps and satellite images, to improve the information collected in standard survey questionnaires. However, few used sketch maps to obtain information from the point of view of the survey respondent about the spatial organization of land use and infrastructure. We developed a method of creating sketch maps with respondents to describe their properties. These maps then provided a spatially referenced database of the social and land use organization of the properties from the perspective of the respondent. Systematic rules allowed sketches to be used in subsequent spatial analyses in combination with satellite images and Global Positioning System reference points Keywords sketch maps; land use; Brazilian Amazon; GIS The method presented in this article was implemented as part of a large-scale survey of households designed to elicit information about household demography, economy, and land use. The larger project links these data to remotely sensed (satellite) data on land cover and to other biophysical data from a variety of sources. In doing so, it follows practices for linking social survey data to satellite data developed in the population and environment research community in the past two decades (Moran et al. 1994;Liverman et al. 1998;Castro et al. 2002;Fox et al. 2003;Rindfuss et al. 2004;Turner, Moran, and Rindfuss 2004;Evans, VanWey, and Moran 2005). Among these practices is using sketch maps during interviews to establish rapport between interviewer and respondent and to improve comprehension of land use in the survey (Turner et al. 2001;Bilsborrow, Barbieri, and Pan 2004;Brondizio 2005 The study of population and environment has depended on linked social survey and satellite data to understand the role of human demography in land use and land cover (LULC) change. Many researchers have developed methods for linking the two sources of data, particularly for accurately identifying the boundaries of properties (or fields) and linking these boundaries to satellite-based land cover classifications. These researchers have usually treated the survey data as spatially explicit only in the sense that they are linked to a property; they have not attempted to understand the spatial organization of the property with survey data. These boundaries are then overlaid on a classified satellite image, which provides information about the spatial organization of land cover within the property, with the classification based on ground truth points collected in the course of survey data collection but not necessarily in the survey itself.This set of practices leads to a privileging of satellite data as a more accurate measure of land use (inferred from land cover classifications or from hyb...

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